Christine Sneed on fact versus fiction

Author Christine Sneed muses on the boundaries between fact and fiction -- and how much it matters.

Author Christine Sneed muses on the boundaries between fact and fiction -- and how much it matters. (Robert Neubecker, Tribune)

Christine Sneed

Where is the line between fact and fiction -- and how much does it matter?

Many readers and writers remember the dust-up in January 2006 between Oprah Winfrey and author James Frey. Frey's memoir, "A Million Little Pieces," was chosen for the talk show host's book club, which all but guarantees enormous profits to an anointed book's publisher and author, and also ensures an author's ability to publish new titles into the foreseeable future. The problem was, however, that between its sky-blue covers, "A Million Little Pieces" contained a lot of fiction. Consequently, Winfrey and numerous other readers were incensed when some of the events in the book were exposed as figments of Frey's fertile imagination.

It also soon came to light that Frey and his agent initially sent out the manuscript as a novel, but no publisher expressed interest. When they sent it out a second time as a memoir, they sold it.

And thus, a star was born, though one that before long fell with much humiliating public fanfare.

At the time of the controversy, I wondered what the big deal was. Frey had told a good story, and some of it was true. That seemed the long and short of it. Did all readers of memoir really expect every word, every remembered conversation to be sacrosanct truth? How was it possible, for example, for Mary Karr, in her 1995 blockbuster memoir, "The Liar's Club," to remember verbatim dozens of conversations her parents had while she was growing up in the alcohol-soaked household from which she emerged as both skilled poet and prose writer?

Surely readers must expect some creative reinterpretation of what an author believes to be the truth in these cases. Realistically, no 5-year-old is so forward-thinking that she will walk around her house tape-recording every possible exchange between family members with a view to later writing her memoirs. (Maybe this isn't so far-fetched today, with the ubiquity of smartphones and their recording functions, but during Karr's childhood, they weren't yet available.)

Conversely, when some novels are published, readers and critics speculate over how many details were drawn directly from an author's life. Often, if the novel contains autobiographical elements, this is a selling point, and perhaps if Frey and his agent had continued to submit "A Million Little Pieces" as a novel, they might have saved themselves a lot of embarrassment. Yet whether or not the book would have sold more than 5 million copies (and been translated into 29 languages) remains an open question.

Nickolas Butler's debut novel, "Shotgun Lovesongs," published in March, for example, became a best-seller upon its release — in part, it seems likely, because Butler based one of the book's focal characters on a high school classmate, Justin Vernon, who left their small Wisconsin hometown and went off to form the two-time Grammy Award-winning group Bon Iver. As Butler noted in an article published in the Wisconsin State Journal in the spring, "What I tell folks is that (Vernon is) just a giant inspiration for us here. Everybody's really proud of him. There was no example of how to succeed in the arts until he made it."

Similarly, in Michigan-based Lisa Lenzo's "Strange Love," a collection of linked short stories published in May that focuses on the main character's life as a single mother and the experiences she had dating different men after her divorce, the author is forthcoming about the book's raw material. "Some stories are more true to life than others," Lenzo wrote me in an email. "But all are mainly autobiographical."

It's no surprise that fiction writers frequently take events from their own lives and embellish or alter them in the service of a novel or a short story. One of the first principles aspiring writers are often taught is to write what they know, to view the situations they've lived through and the people they know as the potential foundations of plot and character.

But this begs the question: "If it's fiction, shouldn't the story and the characters be, on the whole, the issue of the author's imagination?"

Michele Morano, a contributor to "The Best American Essays" and DePaul University professor, offers her perspective on this question via email.

"There's tremendous power in saying this really happened ... maybe we've become a bit addicted to seeing nonfiction everywhere. At the same time, so many works of fiction include characters so similar to their authors that they've trained readers to conflate fiction and non(fiction)."

Fiction and nonfiction writer Miles Harvey agrees.

"There's a pervasive sense of artificiality in our culture, which in turn makes us yearn all the more for something real," he wrote in an email. "We know that ... Twitter feeds, Facebook pages and LinkedIn listings are full of omissions and distortions. We can't seem to find truth anywhere. And as strange as it may sound, I think that's why we increasingly seem to demand it in our fiction."

Likewise, I wonder if readerly curiosity about the context and contents of an author's life is due mostly to an inborn desire to be closer to a person whose creative work we admire, or if, as Harvey mentions above, due to Facebook, Twitter and author websites, we feel as if we have a more intimate connection to the writers whose books we've spent time with. Maybe both.

Whatever the reason, because of the omnipresence of social media, authors are more accessible than at any previous time and seem less like the august and remote personages they once were thought to be. At least they used to seem this way to me, especially before I started writing fiction and began to meet other writers whose work, in a few cases, I'd had an ardent personal relationship with for many years.

Nonetheless, the voice that inquires, "How does she know this? Did this happen to her?" while we read a work of fiction is often implacable. I hear this demanding voice in my own head while reading a novel or a short story, and I wish I could silence it. It seems a hindrance to allowing yourself to be fully seduced by a novelist's imagination.

Last year I published a novel about a family in Hollywood, and since then I have been asked by a number of people how and why I chose to write about the movie industry and the personalities that populate it, despite the fact that I'm neither a filmmaker nor a resident of southern California. The majority of the readers and friends who have asked me this question are genuinely curious and well meaning. It's easy to understand their inquisitiveness, because again, I also ask this question at times when I'm reading fiction.

Yet, when I'm the person being asked, I'm a little wary. One of the first things I wonder about the asker is, "Don't you also consider yourself an armchair authority on movie stars and all that glitters? Aren't we all, to some extent?" Whether we like it or not, we've each had an intimate and more or less lifelong involvement with Hollywood because its films, its fingerprints, are everywhere in the world.

Maybe it does take bravado to write about Hollywood as an outsider, as one Californian critic noted, but any work intended for publication is to some extent an act of bravado.

With the rise in popularity over the last 15 years of novels about wizards and monsters, and another frequent best-seller-list member, the memoir, my impression is that what readers want most are stories that defy belief. I admire the memoir form, and a few of my favorite books are memoirs, but as a fiction writer, I don't want to be measured with the same yardstick.

Chicago-based novelist Rebecca Johns has a solution: "I've been writing more speculative fiction lately, and I suspect it's because no one ever asks you where you got your idea from if your novel is fabulism," she wrote in an email. It's probable that J.K. Rowling is rarely asked if she has spent time training to be a wizard.

Nonfiction writers experience the flipside at times too. "My dilemma is that when I write nonfiction, people will say 'I know you made some of that up!'" says novelist and essayist Bill Roorbach via email. "They will be wrong, of course! But when I write fiction, people will say, 'I know that's really true!' You can't win."

How not to confuse fiction with nonfiction, especially when every day we can read Margaret Atwood's or Steve Martin's tweets and feel as if we have been invited into their lives?

But the voice that asks, "How does she know this?" is noisy and distracting. Does it do us or the author much good if we spend 300 pages wondering if he really did drive from Syracuse to New Mexico in a day and a half, fueled by Dexedrine and whiskey? Or if he ever was the world champion hot pretzel eater who took on that skinny Japanese guy and beat him?

Because, well, how could he be? We've never heard of him before now.

Christine Sneed is the author of the novel "Little Known Facts" and the story collection "Portraits of a Few of the People I've Made Cry."